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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

My Public Service Announcement for FCP-X Users!!

Update: Unfortunately for me, my FCP-X seems to have had a major relapse. After a few days of what seem like snappy performance, we are back to spinning beach balls. Doesn't seem as bad as originally, but the waist and the latency of the cursor to catch up to my movements is again driving me batty. Nothing has changed to cause this. In addition to all all th4e machinations I went through in the first round, I have also added a memory management program Freeman, as suggested above). With 48G of RAM, memory never seems to be the issue. :-(

Has anyone else had a relapse? Anyone have further thoughts? I am wondering about viruses, bus issues, OS weirdness. I think I might install all new internal hard drives (bigger - so it will be worth doing anyway). SHould I delete and reinstall FCPX?

This is truly driving me crazy. If I was new to FCPX, I'd be convinced it was the application and dump it. With months of snappy performance, I think something else is going on.

BTW - I tested the read/write speed of my internal SATA drives. Each came in around 90 MB/s. Not stellar but should be good enough, right?
 
If you have Noise Industry plug-ins installed be certain that is up to date. I believe there was an issue with it that was addressed in an update four months or so ago.

Have you gone through a total 3rd party hardware and software elimination cycle?
 
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Scott - thanks for the suggestions. I have the latest FxFactory version and it looks like all NI plug-ins are up-to-date.

I have not formally methodically done the 3rd party thing, probably should.

On a related matter. I am thinking of moving many of my less speed critical applications to a secondary drive within my tower; to keep my boot drive clean. (I might even move to an SSD). But, dragging and dropping don't seem like the best way to move them. Can someone suggest the proper method to move them that will maintain my ability to use them seamlessly - no serial number errors and such?
 
Scott Crawley said:
Do you keep your active events and projects to a minimum?
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Yes - I use Events Manager and have no more projects and events open than necessary; i.e. no more than 1 or 2 events and a few projects as needed to work among them.
 
I presume that BG rendering was the first thing you turned off. Are there possibly any media management activities going on in the BG?

I have found that the window does not always show all processes that are going on.

Is it possible that you have many nested clips in your open projects, or clips that are deeply nested?

Nested clips can still screw the pooch, and multi cam clips are essentially that if I am not mistaken. I believe that synched clips are basically nested as well. If you put synched clips together in a multi cam clip, you have multiple levels of nesting going on and in my experience, that fucks FCP right up to beach ball status.
 
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Yes, BG rendering is off and, in most cases, there shouldn't be any media management happening as I tend to work exclusively on one project at a time and don't really ever leave any loose ends happening.

You may have nailed it with the nested clips / multi-cam as this project has been multi-cam. It;s the first multi-cam I have done with FCPX so it is quite possibly the issue. Have to admit, I still find it hard to believe that multi-cam can screw things up this badly. I have 48G of RAM and the multi-cam clips are not that long.

The MC clips consist of 60D footage and R3Ds. I made proxies and optimized footage for both along the way just because of this issue. Doesn't seem to matter much if I set to play proxy or original/optimized. I also have a few audio tracks embedded as well so I am thinking this is all to much for FCPX to do on the fly?
 
Terry VerHaar said:
Yes, BG rendering is off and, in most cases, there shouldn't be any media management happening as I tend to work exclusively on one project at a time and don't really ever leave any loose ends happening.

You may have nailed it with the nested clips / multi-cam as this project has been multi-cam. It;s the first multi-cam I have done with FCPX so it is quite possibly the issue. Have to admit, I still find it hard to believe that multi-cam can screw things up this badly. I have 48G of RAM and the multi-cam clips are not that long.

The MC clips consist of 60D footage and R3Ds. I made proxies and optimized footage for both along the way just because of this issue. Doesn't seem to matter much if I set to play proxy or original/optimized. I also have a few audio tracks embedded as well so I am thinking this is all to much for FCPX to do on the fly?
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Multicam clips can work really well, just remember to k.i.s.s.. I was multi clipping camera angles with composited elements within them. I was trying to break it... and I did. :-) It only became a problem when it worked far better than I expected it to. I ran with it and eventually hung myself.

Also do yourself a favor and double check the media management thing. Again, it may not show in the window, so take a look in your asset folder within the event. Since you are using a mixture of R3d I assume that you did not copy the media into the event, so you should have a folder full of alias (aka sim) files. Check to be certain. If some of those R3d resources have been copied over, then you may have BG media management happening unbeknownst to you. This has happened to me a few times, though I know not why.

Edit: To be fair to Apple, the nested clip problem I have encountered (short of the extreme composite example) may still be my fault. I'll elaborate. If you were to synch each of four camera angles with their own audio file and put them together in a single multi cam clip, you are asking the machine to play back eight discreet sources at one time. FCP is capable of doing this. However, if all of those resources reside on the same drive, you could easily create a bottleneck.

It's a working theory I have as to why many of us may be having trouble with this. If true, Apple and their organizational scheme are not without blame but we should know better.
 
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Scott - you have given me a lot to think about. Many thanks. Great way to spend my holiday weekend. LOL

Also - as I posted above but it may have gotten lost...

I am thinking of moving many of my less speed critical applications to a secondary drive within my tower; to keep my boot drive clean. (I might eventually go to an SSD as boot drive). But, dragging and dropping don't seem like the best way to move them. Can someone suggest the proper method to move them that will maintain my ability to use them seamlessly - no serial number errors and such?
 
Terry Ive read and experienced a lot with moving applications around in the OS X world.
It seems drag and drop works perfectly thanks to the way apps are packaged.
of course I also managed to confuse the OS by having too many of the same apps in different volumes.
 
Terry VerHaar said:
So, I checked the update status and it updated from some 5.05 version or so to 5.5.


EDIT: Oh, in case the moral of the story isn't obvious: Don't be a dummy like I was, check your CUDA preferences often!!
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Well, now that unfortunately your original problem had returned, I would like to point out, that if you're using Resolve, updating to the latest CUDA is not recommended. You really must read the Read Me files, where you would see, that the current certified CUDA version is 5.0.37is used with v 9.1.6. So, you need to decide, if Resolve or FCPX is your more important app and update your CUDA accordingly.
Also Mac will show you, that you need to update CUDA, if there is newer version available after the computer restart. It annoys me every time I restart my Mac, but at least it doesn't update CUDA automatically.
 
Jake - thanks very much for the info. I do have Resolve (Lite) installed but haven't used it lately.

I can't swear to it but I don't think I was ever given an update notification for CUDA. Then again, my machine usually runs a long time between restarts.

I'll try and post about any progress I make just so others may develop some insight that I don't have; at least at this point. :-)
 
Just got a new 15" rMBP and got it home eager to open FCP X to throw some EPIC samples in just to push it around a little...worked great but I had this same issue! Then for whatever reason the CUDA update popped up, I closed FCP X, then reopened it up and all was well. I love FCP X, and am so glad its gotten more support from serious editors and for a while I was wondering if Apple was ever going to add some needed features and they did! Only thing I need now is support for punching in your own custom resolutions outside of that one work around or at least more resolutions between 2K and 4K (ie: 2.5K) as well as options for setting up anamorphic projects outside of the ancient 720x480 SD projects. I find its best to stick to one project at a time and if I must do more than one I keep them on seperate hard drives or else it starts rendering other projects in the background, haven't been doing as much editing lately so I can't comment on it 100% but maybe 10.0.6 is different with this? Software updates of all kind are great but I swear with every OS update or update of some important plugin I loose another application that either hasn't updated to play nice with the latest OS X update or worse is not being developed anymore (the latter mostly with small apps thank God but still).
 
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UPDATE: I figured I owe it to folks to post that the CUDA thing wasn't the long term fix I'd hoped it was... the dreaded beachball returned. I think it turned out to be a bit of an accumulation of issues.

Over the last several days I have replaced all 4 of my internal drives - from 1 & 2TB to 3 TB drives. I have also bumped RAM from 16 to 48G, and I have gone the extra step of adding a PCIe flash memory disk as a boot drive (wow - fast!). In the process of doing all this, I obviously cleaned up my data structure and everything seems to be quite zippy right now. I decided not to upgrade my GPU just yet while we wait for RED to tell us more about the new RCX - and perhaps see a new FCPX version.

So far, so good. I do think the multi-cam clips with multiple sources of audio embedded are a bit of a challenge for any machine.
 
Terry how deep do you go with the Multi-cam on average?
 
Eric Santiago said:
Terry how deep do you go with the Multi-cam on average?
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Eric - I actually don't do much multi-cam. In this case, I am working with just two cameras, a Scarlet and a Canon 60D. Added to that there was Scarlet scratch audio + 60D audio plus 3 other tracks (lavs and boom). I think the audio may have been a bit much.
 
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